The Library of Misery / Misery of the Library

Jacques André and Thierry Waegemans exhibit together at Garage Cosmos, one closed, stacked books of his choice aligned on the floor as on a shelf, and the other books open to read, manuscripts shown flat.
 
Invited by Jacques André, Thierry Waegemans will exhibit his notebooks covered with writings and drawings, which he entitles The Library of Misery. Among his sources he does not quote the very situationist On the Poverty of Student Life but, according to an email he just sent us, quotes instead: “1 / The Captain Fracasse by Théophile Gautier, the story of which begins at the Castle Misery. 2 / The Encyclopedia of Nuisances, a post-situ review of the 80's and 90's.” Is it an ironic provocation so much the two quotes differ? His notebooks, in five parts and twenty volumes, attest to his continuous activity since eleven years, from 2007 to 2018. Waegemans distinguishes himself by the fantasy and comical aspect of his chronicles. It would be necessary to go back to Felix Fénéon and his Novels in Three Lines to find such a spirit of freedom in the arts. There exists a secret link in the exhibition between Jacques André and Waegemans, which goes back to Felix Fénéon, an early supporter and friend of Seurat. It is Jacques André himself who suggested this link, since he enjoys speaking, in his improvised and almost uninterrupted verbal commentaries, about the authors he is interested in. Seurat is amongst those artists whom he refers to because he appreciates his quasi-scientific and systematic approach, such as his choice of the golden ratio to compose his paintings or his application of chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul's The Laws of Contrast and Color.

Jacques André replies with The Misery of the Library, a methodical work that consists in the presentation of his repetitive, reiterated purchases of the same books bought in discount stores and second-hand bookshops. Jacques André, who arrives fresh from a personal exhibition at the Grand Hornu Museum, offers us here, through books from his collection, a selection of authors, writers, philosophers, poets and musicians. He listed them in the catalogue published for the exhibition in chronological order, rather than alphabetically as is common practice in library classifications. He presents an assessment of what our culture has become by opposing the contents of books to their corrupted form. The back covers are reproduced in the exhibition catalogue. The ways in which they are formulated illustrate this tendency for a vulgarisation that is here criticised. The misery of the library would be that of paperback publications and their catchy covers. It is quite daring and done with subtlety, without falling into a caricature of institutional criticism or appropriation art.

Opening hours: Friday to Sunday, 11 am – 5 pm
Preview: Friday 28 September, 5 pm – 8 pm